An agricultural harvesting machine such as a combine tractor generally includes a harvesting front attachment mounted onto a feeder or crop elevator. The front attachment gathers the crop material from the field while the feeder directs it to a threshing separating and cleaning mechanism located in the combine to produce grains. The process further completes when those grains are sent from the combine to the next step of the production chain selected for this type grain.
For low growing, thin stemmed crops such as soybeans, barley, wheat, bean, etc., the header driven by the combine has a reciprocating knife at the leading edge called cutterbar. The crop is cut using the cutterbar and falls forward onto laterally extending conveyor that carry the crop to a central section of the header. This laterally extending conveyor was generally a screw conveyor, usually called auger. Nowadays the lateral conveyor is preferably a belt conveyor, which is known as a draper conveyor.
The header is mounted to the combine tractor at open end. The crop material travels laterally by means of the draper conveyor and passes then through this open end to the feeder of the combine.
For some grains, such as wheat, the cutterbar of the header can be spaced from the ground during the cutting operation. For other grains, the cutterbar assembly is set to work slipping over the ground and thus forced to go up and down and curl to assimilate its contour, in order to collect most of the grain. Flexible headers are used to follow the natural contours of the field while cutting the grain.
A common item of the header is a rotating reel with cross members or rungs which carry tines. The reel lifts and moves the plants up to be harvested toward the cutterbar. Another usual items are row dividers units, mounted on the header at the side ends of the reel. The divider units guide, untangle and separate plants located along the periphery of the intended path of travel of the header into the path of travel of the reel. Such crops located along the periphery might otherwise not be harvested, or it might be necessary to slightly overlap the previous path of harvest on the next pass.
Conventional grain harvesters are problematic and suffer from various undesirable limitations. For instance, flexible headers that include a flexible cutterbar are ineffective at receiving all of the severed crop material when following the ground contour at a high speed. Also, prior art headers usually generate high losses of grains at the side ends due to poor designs of their end dividers.
Because the side end crop dividers swing up and down independently of the cutterbar, crop separation is problematical. Prior art headers usually have a lagging of the contour following movements of the end dividers compared to the shifting of the cutterbar. Thus, in at severe contoured terrains they stomp down the crop at the sides at the end dividers location, shelling the plants or leaving them laying severely down negating its future recollection.
Some more advanced end dividers where constructed to swing accordingly to the cutterbar, but designed in a single piece generally excessively wide. Thus, the hole divider behaves as a long stick that when swings aggressively, it digs easily into the ground (when shifting rapidly down) and result broken, or pulls up tangled plants (when shifting rapidly down) and result into losses.
Also, with an average distance between plants of 10 cm on soybeans, and considering that soybean is usually cut with a slant on the platform travel direction respect to the planting rows, a 20 cm width crop divider will tend to stomp at least one plant per row on each platform pass (and turn them impossible to exploit). Prior art row dividers suffer this loss for its excessive width.
It is an object of this invention to provide a header with lateral dividers that harmonically accompany the flexing and twisting of the conveyor belts at the side ends and that generates minimal losses of grains.
The drawing figures do not limit the present invention to the specific embodiments disclosed and described herein. The drawings are not necessarily to scale, emphasis instead being placed upon clearly illustrating the principles of the preferred embodiment.